Can’t We Be Both Compassionate and Pragmatic?

“The man of righteousness tends to be so sure of his own motives that he does not need to inspect consequences.”

– Robert Penn Warren

Let me start off by stating that I am not a gun owner. I did not grow up in a gun owning household, nor in a particularly “pro-gun” community – I don’t even like westerns or war movies. Put simply, I have a hard enough time properly operating the space heater in my bedroom that owning a gun seems like a bit of a leap. On a personal level, I am not very interested in guns; however, I am very interested in free choice and public safety. And in the event we choose to encroach on the former for the sake of the latter, we ought to be certain we will see the results we had intended.

If you do a little homework on the issue of gun control, there’s one argument you’ll find conspicuously absent amongst criminologists: “more guns equal more crime.” There’s not one serious academic I could find making this claim, as it seems to be no more than an emotional, knee-jerk reaction to a very complex problem. This is quite understandable: I once held the same belief myself – after all, it does seem almost intuitive. On the other hand, it also seems intuitive that heavier objects would fall faster than lighter ones, that the earth would be flat, and that bans on drugs would reduce drug use. However upon further investigation, we find that which is immediately obvious isn’t always true. The perplexing truth is that more guns do not equal more crime. In fact, there’s evidence to suggest more guns produce the opposite result. The academic debate is between the issue of increased gun ownership decreasing crime or having no effect at all.

One constant figure in the gun-control debate is John Lott, author of “More Guns, Less Crime.” You’ll find in an article on “Gun Rhetoric vs. Gun Facts” at FactCheck.org that one of Lott’s most ardent critics is a man named John Donohue III. Donohue routinely cites a report on Lott’s work provided by the National Academy of Sciences, which, according to Donohue, took issue with Lott’s conclusions. There are a few problems with citing the findings of this council: first, their conclusion is often taken as a refutation of Lott – which it isn’t. As the report states,

“the committee concludes that with the current evidence it is not possible to determine that there is a causal link between the passage of right-to-carry laws and crime rates.”

Second, using this report as the single, categorical unraveling of Lott’s conclusions ignores all other academic groups and peer-reviewed journals, of which there are many, that have similarly scrutinized Lott’s work and deemed it valid and scholarly. It is only one opinion – Donohue never mentions any others. Luckily, the internet is a beautiful place, and I was able to find a fantastic debate on the topic of gun control, in which both Lott and Donohue took part. You can see Lott directly address Donohue’s criticism’s below:

“The weapons’ menacing looks, coupled with the public’s confusion over fully automatic machine guns versus semi-automatic assault weapons—anything that looks like a machine gun is assumed to be a machine gun—can only increase the chance of public support for restrictions on these weapons.”

The report seems like an outright admission of deliberately playing on the naïveté of the general public to achieve predetermined ends. Statistics don’t seem to matter, nor does any proof suggesting a gun ban would be ineffective. In a recent “Google Hangout” with Joe Biden (see below), the Vice President was asked a question about the rationale behind the proposed assault weapon ban. He responds by mentioning police safety. While police safety is important, this is the first I’d heard of this issue being used as justification for any gun ban whatsoever. So, I think it’s a fair question to ask: is the proposed assault weapon ban a solution in search of a problem? If so, this debate isn’t as honest as we all may like to believe.

As I stated at the begininning, I am interested in both free choice and public safety. If you’re going to remove any measure of individual liberty for the purpose of safety, increased safety had better be the result. However – as we can see from the data – gun regulation at besthas zero affect on crime. When the public expects to see concrete changes from policies that are known to be ineffectual from the outset, you’ve deliberately set the public up for disappointment – making further public outcry for more stringent gun regulations (reductions in personal freedom) an inevitability.

Another common objection to assault weapons: “What do you even needan AR-15 for? What justification do you have for possessing this gun?”

Implicit in this question seems to be the belief that the citizens obtain their rights from government; that our rights are an “allowance” by government somehow, and that we must justify them as being “necessary” in order to keep them. However, in the Constitution, it’s clear the dynamic was meant to be completely opposite: it’s the government that has to justify what little powers it keeps for itself to the people – not the other way around. As U.S. citizens, it’s not our job to justify our right to have a certain gun anymore than it’s our job to justify our right to speak freely. Unless the government can provide clear and substantivereasons for abridging any of our individual freedoms, there’s nothing even to discuss. It’s not a small matter, and shouldn’t be taken lightly.

The big theme of this whole issue has to be facts versus emotion. People want to ban assault weapons because they are scary and associated with scary events.

But factually, they’re not a major driving force in crime and are almost negligible in the murder rate.

If there were more factual support for gun control, maybe there’d be more support for it. But its basically impossible to justify it period, much less to justify removing a fundamental right.

http://www.twitter.com/imedgarfriendly Abe

Bravo. Just bravo.

barry

Defensive gun use studies by Lott and Kleck are pretty funny. One of them suggested that 200,000 lives were saved each year in the US by defensive gun use, due to the results of a self-reported survey. Was there any attempt to idiot-check this number? Of course not, because it sounds cool, it sounds like guns are protecting us.

The rest of the first world has a homicide rate of generally 0.5-2.0 per 100k population. The US is already a high outlier in regards to their contemporaries with a homicide rate of ~4.5. But if you take the 200k on faith, it would mean that without those DGU’s (it even has a TLA!), the US homicide rate would supposedly be SEVENTY per 100k. There are only two countries in the world with a homicide rate that high, El Salvador (69) and Honduras (91). Is the US so unstable a society? Of course it’s not.

Lott has made a long career out of heavily biased studies and reporting. He’s an overblown fool. It’s like when he uses the Australian ban on guns and points at the murder rate not changing much – it’s almost like he doesn’t know that Australia never had much of a civilian gun culture – Australian guns were longarms for farmers, not handguns for ‘defence’. Likewise, the ‘wild west’ he predicted in the wake of the Australian gun ban… never materialised.

You’re also suffering from two more delusions about gun control. The first is that it’s handguns, not longarms that do the most damage. Over three-quarters of firearm homicides are done with handguns. They’re the things that are easy to conceal or have close at hand. Secondly, you’re arguing about gun control from the point of stopping mass shootings. Mass shootings are a drop in the bucket compared to normal homicides. Over ten thousand people per year in the US are killed by firearms. Even in a bad year, you’d be lucky to total a hundred of those in mass shootings.

Also, the line about the consititution being clear is bupkis – read the second amendment again. It’s highly ambiguous. Not to mention that the militia is not ‘every male 18 to 49′ – that definition came in over 100 years later. When the supreme court has to argue over styles of grammar in the sentence, it’s quite obviously not a ‘clear’ statement.

http://noodledoodles.net L.J. Lane

If you can explain why the 200,000 figure is incorrect, please do.

The U.S. has a high homicide rate, but it isn’t uniform throughout the U.S. In some places outside of heavily gun-controlled areas, homicide rates are 1/10th what they are in Europe.

I never mentioned Australia.

I’ve never once disputed that handguns kill more people than longarms.

I address assault weapons only in response to the recent discussion on gun control; Handguns haven’t yet been put on the table. Same goes for my mention of mass shootings – I never once suggest they constitute the majority of gun murders.

You’re speaking across points about the section on Constitutional rights. The point: asking “Why do you need an assault weapon?” (as many gun control advocates have) is a red herring.

Alex

After reading through your article I’ve come across many fallacies that you’ve presented and seem to endorse. You are misleading people with this article in more ways than one; such as misrepresenting information, using a double standard on evidence provided by others against your point, and logical inconsistencies.

The first issue I have with your article is within your first paragraph. You try to position yourself in an unbiased light so as to not be criticised in a particular way. I understand that you might not be biased because of your love for guns however your bias stems from a much more erroneous source, which is a partisan look on political matters.

Your next paragraph makes a series of claims that are outright lies and logically fallible. First off you claim that there is no support for the “more guns more crime” argument, and that if we “do a little homework” we can see this to be true. However this is simply not true, in fact it appears that you have not done any of your homework at all. You can find a plethora of scholarly articles that claim and provide proof that “more guns equal more crime”. (1, 2)

Furthermore you imply that because certain other phenomena (which are entirely unrelated) have been non intuitive in the past that this is the case with the gun control debate now. This is a logical fallacy and has no basis whatsoever. You also state that “The academic debate is between the issue of increased gun ownership decreasing crime or having no effect at all.” This is also not true because the conservative point of controversy is that more guns actually equal less crime. You make this simple statement even though in the very next paragraph you reference John Lott’s book which completely contradicts your claim.

You also seem to ardently defend John Lott’s conclusions even though they have been widely discredited and proven to be false. (3, 4, 5, 6) In fact John Lott sued several authors because they proved his work to be false. (7) You apply a double standard to the criticism you give to Lott as opposed to Donahue. Questioning Donahue’s critique without critiquing Lott himself!

You also clearly contradict simple evidence when you cite the National Academy of Science’s conclusion. You say that they do not contradict Lott’s point, however they do! Lott states that violent crime rates go down when states pass right-to-carry laws(8); this is in complete contradiction to the report given by the NAS. Just because the results don’t say that more guns equal more crimes doesn’t mean it isn’t in contradiction, you have created a false dichotomy. You are downplaying the professionalism of the National Academy of Sciences while bolstering Lott’s conclusion by stating that there are many articles in agreement with his results without providing any links to these papers! This is the main issue I have with your article; you hardly cite any of the information you are claiming. You provide a few hyperlinks throughout the paper but compared to the amount of claims you are making they are far from sufficient.

You also fall under the assumption that the information given in the videos are “facts” yet you never provide actual sources of information that prove these “facts”. For example the claim that guns are used for defensive purposes four to five times more often than for criminal purposes has been debunked (9). On top of that you are presenting half truths and abusing ignorance of statistics to manipulate the readers.

In the closing paragraphs you seem to cry out that gun regulation is an infringement on freedom and aim to justify a purely democratic society. Considering your logic any law set in place is an infringement on freedom. Laws and regulations are used in common sense, to imply that your personal freedom is under attack because of this would be hypocritical without also arguing that all other laws are infringements on liberty. Furthermore your call to a purely democratic society would be utterly chaotic. It failed to work in ancient Greece and the Roman Empire because a purely democratic society favours the majority and silences the minority, freedom will not exist in a society like this.

I would also like to see what your opinion is on several other matters. Including the fact that all the other developed countries in the world have strict gun laws in place and the low crime rates to match it. (10) Yet an astonishing thing happens in these countries… none of them seem to cry out about the “lack of freedom” to own firearms. Owning a firearm is a privilege not a right.

I am interested to hear what you have to say on the “banning” of gun related studies put in place on associations by the NRA. (11, 12). What possible reason could there be to limit research and studies done in this field? This was put into place because in the mid nineties there was an increasing amount of evidence to support that gun control would benefit society, damaging the NRA and any affiliated people or corporations. (13)

Your faulty and biased article shows how little research you’ve done into the subject along with your ignorance and hypocrisy (further amplified in your comment response to “barry”). You have managed to spew out a series of misleading claims with as little evidence and call to logic as possible. I would seriously consider taking down and revising you post along with any related propaganda that you have so inaccurately discussed.